Beware Nerds With Soldering Irons

[NYFelon]

This was just a little project I undertook for 's and giggles. I have a pretty decent 5.1 home theater system in my living room, but while doing things either upstairs or outside, I have to turn it up fairly loud to hear it. Suffice it to say, my dog is not pleased when I do so. So I came up with this as a solution. It's a portable amplifier for my Android, sort of like an iPod dock, but without the stupid apple pricing. Total cost of assembly was <$12.

The circuit board assembled.

The test rig

Test run


All put together in the very same box that the mail order parts came in.

 

[esrice]

Now you gotta rock it out like this guy:

 

[NYFelon]

Oi!! Don't knock the tape deck homes. I still have a pretty good collection of 80s thrash metal and some mix tapes laying around in my attic.

remember waiting like 2 days for a song to come on the radio, and when it finally did, and you hit the record button, and the suminumbishing DJ wouldn't shut up and talked over like the first 20 - 30 seconds of the song?

 

[Suprtek]

That's pretty cool! Just out of curiosity, what's the power source for the amp?

 

[NYFelon]

That's pretty cool! Just out of curiosity, what's the power source for the amp?

it plugs into the regular wall outlet. That runs into a 12.6V 1 amp transformer that's the rectified into appx 14.4 V DC. The object to the far left with the metal strap overtop is the transformer. There's a little round black IC to the top of the filter cap in the first picture, that's the bridge diode that rectifies the AC to DC. The small square IC to the top of that is a 5V voltage regulator that powers the power on indicator circuit, and the big chip to the bottom of the board is the actual amplifier. It's a 2 channel 10 X 10 watt toshiba chip.

 

[AZ Hunter]

+1 on being able to do crap on your own!

 

[E5RANGER375]

a while back on here someone posted a link talking about african ingenuity because they are so poor in some parts. It showed pictures of all kinds of rigged stuff, like radios and speakers, toys, etc .. one of the things a guy made was something similar to what you made. your very crafty but I laughed out loud when I saw your design because it made me think of that thread. nice job though.

 

[SmileDocHill]

I love these hacks!
My nerdy confession:
I made a headphone jack reverse splitter so I could use my headphones to listen to 2 different sources at the same time. It was WAY more low teck than what you are doing but it was for utilitarian purposes. When my buddies and I play old school COD and MOH you have to use headphones to avoid feedback. When I hosted the game there were basically 3 software applications running, the host game, skype for the conference call, and my game. I ran skype and the host game (in dedicated host mode) on a second desktop I had at the time because it was noticeably faster for everyone. I used my other computer to play the game on. This put the 2 sound sources on 2 computers which allowed them to be adjusted individually. Plug both the source jacks and my headphones into my "box" and I could dial up and down the voice and game sounds individually. I could hear people's footsteps coming around the corner to the point it was like cheat code.

 

[Suprtek]

When I was a kid I used to go to yard sales with my mom and buy junk radios and speakers. I would take a portable radio out of its case and mount it inside the box of a larger stereo speaker. Sometimes I was even able to make small openings in the speaker box to access the controls for the radio. I'd add some batteries (usually one more than what it normally ran on) and hang it on the wall. It obviously wasn't high end sound, but it sounded a lot better than the original tiny portable radio. At one point I had 6 or 8 of them hanging in different places in my room. It made it look like I had some kind of wireless sound system. It was kind of a pain changing the station on each one of them individually though! But hey, I was 10 or 12 years old.

 

[NYFelon]

I love these hacks!
My nerdy confession:
I made a headphone jack reverse splitter so I could use my headphones to listen to 2 different sources at the same time. It was WAY more low teck than what you are doing but it was for utilitarian purposes. When my buddies and I play old school COD and MOH you have to use headphones to avoid feedback. When I hosted the game there were basically 3 software applications running, the host game, skype for the conference call, and my game. I ran skype and the host game (in dedicated host mode) on a second desktop I had at the time because it was noticeably faster for everyone. I used my other computer to play the game on. This put the 2 sound sources on 2 computers which allowed them to be adjusted individually. Plug both the source jacks and my headphones into my "box" and I could dial up and down the voice and game sounds individually. I could hear people's footsteps coming around the corner to the point it was like cheat code.

very cool. I'm sure it wasn't long before the "U R 733t haxorz accusations came flying.

nice job.

When I was a kid I used to go to yard sales with my mom and buy junk radios and speakers. I would take a portable radio out of its case and mount it inside the box of a larger stereo speaker. Sometimes I was even able to make small openings in the speaker box to access the controls for the radio. I'd add some batteries (usually one more than what it normally ran on) and hang it on the wall. It obviously wasn't high end sound, but it sounded a lot better than the original tiny portable radio. At one point I had 6 or 8 of them hanging in different places in my room. It made it look like I had some kind of wireless sound system. It was kind of a pain changing the station on each one of them individually though! But hey, I was 10 or 12 years old.

Also very cool. I'm just a great big nerd at heart and love tinkering with shiz.

 

[bluewraith]

Nice. I'm more into microcontrollers and such, small robots and simple electronic toys. Nothing worth trying to upload an image here, but I have a few posts on my blog about them. http://bluewraith.blogspot.com
i did get on Hack A Day once though, so I guess thats something.

 

[NYFelon]

a while back on here someone posted a link talking about african ingenuity because they are so poor in some parts. It showed pictures of all kinds of rigged stuff, like radios and speakers, toys, etc .. one of the things a guy made was something similar to what you made. your very crafty but I laughed out loud when I saw your design because it made me think of that thread. nice job though.

LOL!!

Long live Afro-Engineering!!!

 

[NYFelon]

Nice. I'm more into microcontrollers and such, small robots and simple electronic toys. Nothing worth trying to upload an image here, but I have a few posts on my blog about them. http://bluewraith.blogspot.com
i did get on Hack A Day once though, so I guess thats something.

dude!! cool stuff man. I built my son a little electronic roulette game with VCO 555, a 164 synchronous counter and a flip flop reset....but he couldn't be bothered with it. It just sits on his shelf while he plays his XBox.